Don't be afraid to touch them, they won't bite

Dismantling the pedestal art is placed on ... Astra Howard's The Other (Inside) II.

In 1968 the Austrian performance artist Valie Export appeared in public wearing a box-like apparatus fitted with curtained holes through which passers-by were invited to fondle her breasts.

She called this work Tap & Touch Cinema. It turned the viewing experience into a tactile one, forcing "filmgoers" to enact their darkest desires in the cold light of day. Export risked physical abuse, not to mention arrest, to produce one of the most provocative, if still little-known, performances in postwar art. The original styrofoam box hasn't survived, but photographs show the discomforting moment when the hands of strangers made contact with the flesh within.

This contact represented a breach of many things: public morality; personal safety; conventional gender roles; as well as distinctions between genres such as sculpture, theatre and film. Most of all, it represented a breach of the embargo against touch, the time-honoured, critically sanctioned noli me tangere, that puts art on an unapproachable pedestal - and viewers at a distance.

Export's ideas hover over a new show at Ivan Dougherty Gallery, although nowhere is she cited in the catalogue essay or supporting texts. The exhibition comprises works by UNSW College of Fine Arts Faculty members and PhD candidates. It's called Outside In, a reference to the dismantling of the walls between gallery precinct and wider space, and to the human body's capacity to contain whole worlds of meaning - whole geometries, whole architectures, whole social systems. Carol Longbottom's otherwise uneventful grid of symbolic objects, Six Momentos, 2003, bears an instruction which spells it out: "Please Touch." Richard Goodwin's Taxi-Dermis Pod, 2001, begs to be opened, occupied and revved up. Its sexy motorbike seat is an incitement to straddling. In similar fashion, the zips on Gwenda Maude's Birthing Pods, 2003, crave to be loosened, liberating the squishy bio-matter detectable through viewing slots.

In Mari Velonaki's and Gary Zebington's Unstill Life, 2000-03, an apple must be lifted from a stoup in order to activate, and nourish, a digital woman resting in ebony-framed, Old Masterly grandeur in an enclosed chamber. And while the massed hairpins in Bonita Ely's Infrastructure 262OBR, 2003, snake beyond our reach in the ceiling, we seek their familiar shapes with our eyes, looking for every characteristic bump and bend. In doing so, we take part in the normally inactive space above the line of sight, extending our experiential realm as well as that of the art object.");document.write("

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Maureen Burns, Katherine Moline and Michele Barker and Anna Munster offer fewer opportunities for touch, leastways not in the concrete sense, but again their exhibits spark questions about viewer involvement in art. Moline's Lightwell for Gray, 2003, and Complex Pleasures for Mendieta, 2003, respectively invoke the 1930s designer Eileen Gray and the early-'70s performer Ana Mendieta, the latter an exponent of the body art pioneered by Export a few years before. Mendieta's famous silhouette series resulted from impressions made by her anatomy in the landscape, an almost textbook demonstration of art's environmental repercussions.

It is Astra Howard's work, however, which comes closest to the spirit of Export. The Other (Inside) II, 2003, is a public action captured on video and replicated as a live performance during the exhibition. In a severe wooden box - echoing the "white cube" space of a contemporary gallery - Howard sits with a bare arm and leg protruding from separate holes. Nothing else of her body is revealed. Small, largely inadvertent movements indicate living tissue, enough to dispel any thought that the limbs are another example of the realist sculpture so modish at present.

At Ivan Dougherty, the box is fixed quite high on the wall, elevated in the manner of a venerated statue. But during the public action the box simply stood on a suburban footpath, exposed to the gaze and touch of passers-by.

Curiously, not one among the hurrying citizens seen in the video seems shocked by the body in a box. Some pause momentarily, just to get their bearings on this latest instance of pavement impedimenta. A few smile. One or two suppress what could be a sinister temptation. But that's it. Heaven knows what Howard was expecting, but if it included some sort of sudden, dramatic dialogue with her audience, some sort of physical interaction, she must have been disappointed. If anything, her work proves that we urban dwellers have an exaggerated tolerance for the unusual.

Howard performed a version of The Other (Inside) in Delhi earlier this year. Judging by a photograph, the box was larger and more concealing, conditions around it were more crowded, and viewers less inhibited in their reactions.

Respecting local proprieties, the artist did not offer her naked leg for scrutiny. This sensitivity to the values of Indian society stands in contrast to Howard's willingness to offend, or at least challenge, Australian values. Trouble is, we have so few values left for artists, or anyone else, to offend. We're jaded, defensive, stitched-up and numb.

Breaching the walls of a gallery is nothing. Getting through to ordinary people in the workaday world is a tougher proposition. Each of the artists in this pleasing show dreams of achieving that. Goodwin has come closer than most via his activities as a much-commissioned creator of large-scale public sculptures in Sydney. But the truth about Outside In is that, while making a song and dance about accessibility, it stays inside playing safe.